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Thursday, January 27, 2011

Which would you give up: Cable, Internet, or cell phone?

What if you weredrastically trimming your household budgetand had to choose between your cable, your internet service, or your cell phone. Which would you give up?AdAge and Ipsos Observersurveyed 1,000 U.S. consumers earlier this month, and found that many people—49 percent of respondents—would be willing to cut their cable without too much trouble. But the internet? No way. In fact, more people said that they'd give up eating before getting rid of internet service at home.Even though we use our smartphones as alarm clocks and GPS units, for emailing, social networking,amusing our kids,amusing ourselves, getting organized,looking up information, andkeeping trackof pretty mucheverything in our lives, 37 percent of those surveyed said they'd be willing to give up their mobile phones before getting rid of their TVs.The survey also found that one in four people already watch plenty of television shows and movies on a non-television platform (using Hulu.com, for example, or streaming via Netflix). Which could explain why cutting cable or satellite TV service seems fairly painless, while cutting internet seems too extreme. Just six percent said they'd be willing to live without internet access; eight percent said they'd rather live without food. (We like to think we can have it all—and maybe we can, if wetrim a little bit off our cell phone bills, make a few changes toour cable packages, andmake the most of what's available online.)